Situated in a difficult neighborhood, New Delhi has laid strong emphasis on both nuclear safety and security for a couple of decades now. Almost three decades of state-sponsored terrorism and insurgencies of varying scale and proportion within India have meant that security of nuclear materials and installations has been a great worry to India’s security and atomic energy establishments. India’s concerns even predate the Western focus on WMD terrorism, which gained prominence only after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.  Unfortunately, India’s excessive caution and secrecy in the nuclear arena has led the world to assume that India does not pay much attention to this issue or that it has inadequate security, which is far from the truth.

Congress has released its Omnibus appropriation bill for funding the entire government, including National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear non-proliferation and security programs. The following is a snapshot of the fiscal year 2016 request and Congressional appropriation process, as well as charts providing some context about what these numbers mean.  This non-proliferation budget is the last that will be fully executed by the Obama administration.

A new YouTube video, released ahead of a government planning meeting for the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, charges that stronger nuclear security can be as simple as five words.  These five words are the 5 Priorities, a concept born in 2014 when a diverse group of nuclear security experts identified the most impactful policy changes that could advance global nuclear security. After rallying supporters and polishing their ideas, the 5 Priorities effort was launched to garner the attention of world leaders and help the broader public understand how the decisions made at the 2016 summit will impact them.

On October 27, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing titled "Prevention of and Response to the Arrival of a Dirty Bomb at a U.S. Port."

In prisons as in nuclear facilities, employees are tasked with guarding something highly dangerous in high-stress environments. Both face high costs in the event of failure, and both are especially vulnerable to complacency and insider threats. Given these parallels, two inmates’ dramatic break-out from a New York prison in early June offers nuclear security practitioners valuable insights into how to avert an equally dramatic (and potentially much more consequential) breech.

Six years ago, Ambassador Linton Brooks offered some remarkably prescient thoughts on what the U.S.-Russian relationship might look like in 2015, and the implications for nuclear security cooperation — though, of course, he could not have anticipated the conflict in Ukraine. Brooks’ 2009 assessment is reproduced below, followed by his reflections on the topic today.

Ukraine-based journalist Maxim Tucker has just published two articles to claim that pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine are plotting to manufacture a dirty bomb with the help of Russian scientists, using radioactive waste from a storage facility at the Donetsk Chemical Factory.

Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists recently wrote an interesting piece about two men who were arrested for allegedly planning an attack on an Italian military base that stores U.S. nuclear weapons. You can read his full account here.

Are nuclear sites secure?  There are some who might assume the answer is yes and that we should not worry about the possibility of nuclear bomb material being stolen. Yet, recent history has repeatedly demonstrated that high security facilities thought to be secure were actually vulnerable. Two such incidents last month illustrated this idea.

Kazakhstan hosted a four-day international conference examining the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (6/1/2015).